2 Things We Should Stop Doing If We Want to Avoid War with Russia

Walter
G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan
University. He is the author of A History
of Russia, Vol.
I and Vol.
II and is a Contributing Editor of HNN.

The Russian Federation as depicted on Wikipedia

Among experts and
pundits commenting on the continuing Ukrainian crisis two regrettable
phenomena have increased: name-calling and misapplying historical
lessons. An example of the first failing is Cathy Young’s op ed in
The Boston Globe entitled “Putin's
strange bedfellows.” Young is a Moscow-born columnist for
Newsday and other publications, and she included among the
“bedfellows” the Nation’s “resident Russian scholar,”
Stephen Cohen.” She also reminded readers that The New Republic
referred to him as “Putin’s American apologist.”

Another example of
name-calling comes from
Anders Aslund, former Swedish diplomat, author
of many books on the Russian and Ukrainian economies, and an economic
adviser in the 1990s, first to Russia and then to Ukraine. In late
August, he sent several notes to Johnson’s
Russia List (JRL) in which he accused the list’s editor of
running “Russian lies” and of favoring pieces by “Stephen
Cohen, Thomas Graham, Dmitri Trenin or other minor Putin
apologist[s]” while paying “scant attention” to such “major
figures in our fields, such as Michael McFaul, Strobe Talbott and
David Remnick.”

Having previously
praised JRL for its detailed and varied coverage of the Ukrainian
crisis and conflict, I believe Aslund’s attack is unfair. I am not
alone. British scholar Richard Sakwa, who has authored many books on
Putin and Russian politics, responded
to Aslund’s accusations as follows:

I am
extremely disturbed by the note from Anders Aslund registering his
disquiet about the alleged “Russian lies” that you have carried
on your list. Aslund is a scholar for whom I have enormous respect,
but with whom I often disagree—and that's the way it should be. I
think that the Ukraine crisis has demonstrated the degree to which
public and academic discourse has degenerated, and the way in which
there are constant attempts to intimidate those who hold different
views. Your list is one of the few places that has not succumbed to
this degeneration, and offers a whole range of views, often unpopular
ones; and I am sure that in historical perspective your choices and
work as a whole will be vindicated.

More than this, JRL has
been one of the few places where the whole depth of the human tragedy
that has engulfed the Donbas, and Ukraine in general, has been
reflected, quite often in moving terms.

The tragedy that Sakwa mentions has
multiple causes and defies simplistic explanations such as “It’s
all Putin’s fault.” This leads us to our second point: the
misapplication of historical precedents. Putin’s actions regarding
Ukraine have sometimes been compared to Hitler’s. Indeed, in regard
to the self-determination of Crimea and Russia’s annexation of it,
there are parallels to Hitler’s insistence on “self-determination”
for the city of Danzig (Gdansk) and the ethnic Germans in
Czechoslovakia’s “Sudetenland.” Although I have previously
acknowledged
this similarity, the comparison of Putin to Hitler has often gone too
far. At the end of August, for example, British Prime Minister David
Cameron warned
of “appeasing Putin as we did Hitler.” Specifically, he mentioned
the “Anglo-French appeasement” of Hitler at the Munich Conference
in 1938.

Historians, as well as political
leaders and others, often try to apply some lesson or other from the
past to help us grapple with present problems. And we are right to do
so. But as Rodric Braithwaite, former British ambassador in Moscow,
once warned in a History
News Network essay about Afghanistan and what lessons U.S.
policymakers could learn from the Soviet experience there: “You
have to be careful about drawing lessons from history: the gritty
details differ every time.”

Indeed, we historians, and others less
familiar with history, often apply the wrong lessons. Too many
countries entered the Great War (WWI) without realizing what the
terrible and horrific consequences might be. The lesson many learned
from that collective trauma was to be wary of ever going to war so
casually again. Certainly the horrors experienced in WWI led some in
Britain and France to be cautious about going to war against Nazi
Germany, to appease Hitler, until he attacked Poland in September
1939. And what we learned from appeasing Hitler for so long in the
1930s was that appeasement was a bad word. And thus in the 1960s we
were determined not to appease the communists in South Vietnam
because appeasement just strengthened the forces of evil. But what we
failed to realize was that Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communists
were very different than Hitler and the Nazis. We failed to consider
adequately the whole Indochinese relationship to France, the part Ho
Chi Minh played in the fight against French colonialism, and the
likelihood that many Vietnamese would view U.S. troops as a new
unwelcome foreign presence.

In an essay
on exercising wise “Political Judgment” Isaiah Berlin once
stated: “Obviously what matters is to understand a particular
situation in its full uniqueness, the particular men and events and
dangers, the particular hopes and fears which are actively at work in
a particular place at a particular time.” Too often in the past our
political and military leaders have paid insufficient attention to
such particulars and have resorted to attacking non-hawkish positions
as appeasement.

Ever since
Ukrainian protests began in November 2013 over President
Viktor Yanukovych’s announcement that his country was backing off
closer ties with the European Union, the Ukrainian crisis has been an
extremely complex phenomenon. It has involved his ouster, Crimea’s
secession and subsequent annexation by Russia, conflict between
eastern Ukrainian separatists and Ukrainian government forces, and
the exercising of foreign influences on Ukrainians. Although there is
little doubt that Russia’s President Putin has backed the
separatists, disputes exist as to exactly how and to what extent. The
same is true for Western support of Ukrainian political forces which
desire closer contact with the United States, the European Union and
NATO.

Simplistic accusations, approaches, and
applications of history’s “lessons” ignore the “full
uniqueness” of events like the Ukrainian crisis. All of us
observers of it, regardless of our expertise, are
like the blind men in the Buddhist version of the parable
where they all describe an elephant differently depending on which
part of it they touched. Reality is much larger than most of us can
grasp, and like the blind men who only felt a tusk, a trunk, or a
tail, we are wrong to think that reality is limited to the small
portion we can grasp.

We live in age of political gridlock,
know-it-alls, and name calling. We could all use a heavy dose of
humility. My own opinion, as
expressed previously, is that the present Ukrainian crisis
resembles more the tensions preceding World War I than those leading
up to World War II. While the West should avoid any appeasement than
encourages further aggression, greater dangers now face us: stumbling
into some sort of tragic conflict, as Europe did in 1914, or
beginning a new Cold-War era.

At an early September meeting, NATO
promised to provide Ukraine with training and help to better organize
its military, and some people in the United States and in other NATO
countries debate whether to supply Ukraine with radar and anti-tank
weapons. The Ron Paul Institute reported
that a “spokesman for US-backed
Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko revealed: ‘At the NATO summit agreements were
reached on the provision of military advisers and supplies of modern
armaments from the United States, France, Italy, Poland and Norway.’ ” Although a cease-fire in eastern
Ukraine was proclaimed around the same time, many outside observers
remained skeptical regarding how long it could last.

The key question for many U.S. citizens
regarding Ukraine is, “What should the U.S. response be.” Many
right-wing critics of President Obama fault him for not being tough
enough with Putin, for not showing him that aggression doesn’t pay.
Like Britain’s Prime Minister Cameron they warn of any 1930s type
appeasement. Some of these critics say we should furnish more arms to
Ukraine.

Three former United States ambassadors
to Russia, who collectively served under presidents Reagan, George
Bush Sr., and Clinton criticize
such a step as “more of the same, with little if any assurance of
better outcomes.” They note that relations between Washington and
Moscow “have descended into attempts by each side to pressure the
other, tit-for-tat actions, shrill propaganda statements, and the
steady diminution of engagement between the two governments and
societies.” They go on to say:

What
the Western strategy lacks is an equally vigorous diplomatic approach
to ending this conflict. Diplomatic efforts should aim to provide
Ukraine and its neighbors with a future that can sustain peace and
security for all countries in the area; re-establish respect for the
core principles of Europe’s political order; and open the way for
more productive American-Russian relations. . . . It is time for the
United States to use its diplomatic assets, including our new
ambassador in Moscow [John Tefft], to take active leadership of
diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis over Ukraine.

This advice of the former ambassadors
seems sound. We need less hubris, name calling and applying
simplistic “historical lessons.” Instead, we should be humble
truth-seekers who encourage wise and imaginative diplomacy.